Take Kimberly Jeffrey, for instance. The 43-year-old says she was pressured into a tubal ligation while she was sedated and strapped to a surgical table, about to give birth. This, after she repeatedly rejected previous requests from prison medical staff to perform the procedure.

"[Heinrich] said, 'So we're going to be doing this tubal ligation, right?' " Jeffrey said. "I'm like, 'Tubal ligation? What are you talking about? I don't want any procedure. I just want to have my baby.' I went into a straight panic."

Last month, it was revealed that levels of a toxic pesticide more than 100 times the EU limit were present in a source of English drinking water. The discovery of record levels of metaldehyde – a chemical used in slug pesticides – was reported by Natural England and the Environment Agency at the River Stour, which supplies water to homes in Essex and Suffolk. There's currently no treatment method available to extract this chemical from drinking water – once it's there, we're drinking it.

The researchers, Tal Shomrat and Michael Levin, trained flatworms to travel across a rough surface to access food, then removed their heads. Two weeks later, after the heads grew back, the worms somehow regained their tendency to navigate across rough terrain, as the researchers recently documented in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

@Kay & Argos: Organ trafficking was predicted in the 70's in Larry Niven's Known Space books. In the books, it got so that demand rapidly outstripped supply; so death row prisoners were executed and parts used. Demand rose again, so more and more crimes became capital ones - including jaywalking.

Also, Niven called the trafficking "organlegging", which should totally catch on as the term of art.

The whole 'organlegging' thing was the subject of one of my all time favourite Judge Dredd stories as well. In it the Judges go undercover to bust an 'arms smuggling ring', only to discover it's actual human arms being smuggled...